As forward-thinking as the makers of the Constitution were, they were not able to foresee the incredibly fast way people would be able to communicate within a few short centuries.
Voicing discontent over King George or planning the Boston Tea Party over a vast electrical network that spanned the entire New World would have been unthinkable realities. But we live in an age where this is possible and prominent, and new advances always bring the question of how to properly manage them.
While the Internet has made communication literally at the speed of sound, information still gets around by word of mouth on the information super highway, and personal blogs and public forums have become hotbeds for topic. In some respects the mainstream media have been sidelined-not by the power of the pen, but by the power of the “Enter” key.
What freedoms do we really have with freedom of speech, and what in our increasingly intangible world is considered private? The recent outcry against Bush’s post Sept. 11 policy to have the National Security Agency (NSA) tap certain domestic phone lines has us asking this very question.
While the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has guidelines to eavesdropping on foreign and domestic phone conversations, we will have to see how the judicial branch interprets the First and Fourth amendments (granting us freedom of speech and protecting us from unwarranted search and seizure) as to whether or not Internet blogs and personal Web pages are considered protected.
The Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) is an organization that was formed to help protect the general public from technological harassment. Leading the way in protecting people in this new information age, here’s what the EFF said about our speech rights as college students when it comes to posting pictures or statements on Web sites like Facebook: under the “material disruption” standard founded in the Tinker case of 1969 (allowing high school students to wear black armbands in protest of the Vietnam war), student’s First Amendment rights apply on and off school grounds.
There have also been rulings, including a particular one by the Supreme Court in 1988, that said school officials had the right to censor school-sponsored texts if they were related to “legitimate pedagogical concerns.”
However, in our case, Facebook does not fall under that ruling as found by a number of high courts because the ruling says “censorship of a student’s publication by a public college or university would amount to an unconstitutional prior restraint.”
The previous rulings also do not apply to Facebook and blogs because these sites are considered public forums, which by definition means school administrators do not have the ability to edit their content.
Another important thing to note is although these rulings are applied to printed publications, these same precedents are still used to deal with electronic texts because of the lag time between judicial rulings and technological advances in communication.
The courts have been more giving toward our right to say what we want as college students, but there are limits.
Posting defamatory comments on your Web site or blog about a particular person, group or organization affiliated with the school could get you negative attention by administrators and a possible lawsuit.
Likewise, threatening speech in jest could be taken seriously by law enforcement officers. Recent happenings on Facebook show that airing of personal matters on an unsecured source like the Internet is a widespread problem.
In the last few months, North Carolina State has charged nine students with violating the school’s alcohol policy after an RA viewed pictures of them on Facebook drinking in a residence hall. One school official said he has no sympathy for students who should have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” on these sites accessed by millions of users.
Northern Kentucky University has taken administrative action on five students for the same campus violation, and students at the University of California in Santa Barbara are being warned about what they put on their Facebook profiles.
However, the most troubling report probably comes from Virginia Commonwealth University, where a murdered 17-year-old freshman was an avid myspace.com user, and concerns about the amount of personal information she posted have investigators thinking that it could have had something to do with her death.
Although we all have the right to express ourselves and our opinions, we must use common sense and our own discretion to know what is permissible in this highly technological age. We also have to be careful not to throw around phrases like “our right to free speech” without realizing the laws do not apply to every situation the same way.
As we await future rulings on how the courts will interpret our constitutional right to privacy and free speech in this world of hi-tech communication, we have to protect ourselves from being the targets of backlash from our own careless actions.